Network-accessible content can be accessed from a myriad of devices that can have widely differing capabilities, including display capabilities. One type of device that can access network-accessible content are traditional computing devices, including laptop and desktop computers, which typically comprise a sufficiently sized display to enable all but the most complex of network-accessible content to be displayed without egregious formatting changes. Another type of device that can access network-accessible content are smaller, more portable, and often more limited computing devices, such as tablet computing devices, personal digital assistants, smartphones, and other like devices which typically may not comprise, due to their portability and dedicated functionality, large displays. Accessing network-accessible content on such devices can either result in a sub-optimal viewing experience for the user, or can require a substantial amount of reformatting to properly display the network-accessible content on the limited displays of such devices.
Often, the authors of network-accessible content desire to make such content both as broadly available as possible, and as easy to consume as possible. For example, one type of network-accessible content that is designed to be both broadly available and easily consumable are the ubiquitous webpages that comprise the World Wide Web. Traditionally, the authors of such webpages desire that their content is presented in a controlled and visually pleasing manner irrespective of the type of computing device utilized to access such content. Thus, traditionally, the authors of such webpages desire that their content appear in a pleasing manner whether it is viewed on a computing device having a large display, such as a laptop or desktop computer, or whether it is viewed on a computing device having substantially smaller displays, such as tablet computing devices, personal digital assistants, or smart phones.
While traditional text-based content can be fairly easily reformatted for any size display, such as, for example, by simply changing the length of a line of text in accordance with the width of the display, other content can be more difficult to format such that it appears in a pleasing manner on a wide variety of displays and display sizes. For example, tables or tabular structures can be difficult to reformat for displays that are not as wide as the table. Often, such reformatting results in visually unappealing layouts, with elements that were supposed to be proximate to one another being placed further apart and in areas that their relationship is no longer evident. Other layout formats, that the authors of webpages may desire to use in order to arrange and present visually pleasing content, can be likewise difficult to reformat for small displays.